03 January, 2009

"Next month is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, who by an odd quirk of history was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln, and to commemorate the occasion there are almost as many Darwin books jamming the conveyor belt as there are new books about Abe. These recent additions to the already vast Darwin literature include biographies, encyclopedias, defenses of evolution and reconsiderations of “The Origin of Species,” which came out 150 years ago, another milestone worth remarking.

But in this country at least, Darwin is not nearly as beloved as Lincoln, and in the struggle for bookstore supremacy he will most likely fall short. Polls repeatedly suggest that at least half of all Americans regard as fundamentally erroneous Darwin’s conclusion that human beings are descended from earlier species, and Kenneth R. Miller in his new book “Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul” points out that among industrialized nations we rank next to last, above only Turkey, in our acceptance of evolution and its principles."